


you don't have to say i love you (to say i love you)

by asvmmershower



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: 5+1 Things, M/M, feat. alex being an oblivious idiot, henry pining as Usual, yeah i just love them a lot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 06:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19458718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asvmmershower/pseuds/asvmmershower
Summary: five times henry realized he was in love with alex and one time he said it aloud.





	you don't have to say i love you (to say i love you)

i.  
Rio Olympics. 2016.

The whole thing feels like an out of body experience for Henry – a shuffling to and fro, a reminder of all that he has to look forward to, heir to the fucking English throne. His heart is in his mouth and he only remembers glimpses of it at a time. The girls at the bar last night, batting their eyelashes and giggling, fighting for his attention. The man who’s name he doesn’t remember, choosing to hook up with him to just make the voices in his head go silent. Philip catching a glimpse of the hickey the next morning and asking, with a smirk, who the lucky girl was.

If only he could smash everyone who thinks he's any form of straight in the face. Unfortunately, as a prince, that's on his long list of things he is not allowed to do. 

He wants to scream constantly. The therapist told him all of this was normal and to be expected, so short after the death. But the therapist didn’t tell him it would constantly ache everywhere, all the time, and that every part of his public grieving would be dissected by money-hungry tabloids. He’s experienced it all before, but that was when he had his dad and Bea. 

Now one’s lying six feet under the ground and the other is constantly slipping in and out of his grasp, comes back in increments and then decides to leave again. The lump in his throat physically multiplies every time he thinks about the fact that he’s betrayed his one promise to his father, that he would take care of Bea. Because he wants to. He wants to grab her and shake her by the goddamn shoulders. 

But she doesn’t listen to anyone anymore, and he’s unable to get through to her, and he’s trying so hard to be strong for everyone else he’s forgotten he even has processable emotions anymore. And now he’s stuck here, surrounded by people who don’t know him for anything belong a title that he wants to trample into the ground.

He huffs a laugh into his wrist. The idea of being unknown. Trampled into the dust since his birth, never an option for him, never even allowed to try. He guesses he got used to it.

Shaan walks up behind him and claps him on the shoulder. “Claremont’s son at your right. Put on your camera face.”

Right. He’s forgotten Ellen Claremont’s son would also be present at the diving finals, which is a bit silly of him, because in some small part of his brain he also remembers Shaan telling him that they orchestrated this for them to introduce themselves to each other. Carefully planned friendships with world leader’s childrens been his duty since – well, since forever.

However, Claremont-Diaz - his first name escapes him - hasn’t noticed him yet. This gives Henry the perfect opportunity to scope him out first – they don’t make you do all of that royal etiquette training for shit.

The first thing that strikes Henry about him is how… Alive he seems. He’s talking with a girl at his side, whom Henry presumes is Claremont’s daughter. His hair is long, curling around his ears and partway down his neck, and his eyes are bright with excitement.

His eyes. Henry gets caught up on them for a minute. They’re a rich brown, but unlike the muted tones he’s used to seeing on the people around the palace, they seem to glimmer and glow and catch every bit of light reflected into them. They’re the colour of his father’s favourite whisky that he used to sneak from the bottle, the sun as it’s about to set with the rays piercing the horizon. He’s never seen anyone who he could properly describe as perfect before, but he think this is a starting point.

Henry chooses to ignore the small details, like how the boy’s lips curve when he laughs at a particular joke or how his throat stops feeling like it’s ensnared in barbed wire and, instead, opens up to this idea – this idea of hope.

Then the boy swings around, his grin still playfully mischievous, and catches Henry’s eyes, smile growing even wider. He supposes he’s waited for this moment for quite a while, considering the way he immediately stops what he’s saying to jog over to him. Suddenly everything starts closing over again.

He thinks about tears muffled into pillows and screams only let out behind closed doors and mugs smashed because he wants to physically destroy something. He thinks about how, fourteen months ago, his life broke apart entirely and he hasn’t even found the pieces to begin rebuilding it. He thinks about twinkling eyes and grins as big as the sun and he thinks about how someone this perfect can’t possibly be let near him, because he’ll find a way to destroy it.

His thoughts are too loud and his throat is too dry and he can’t pretend like he cares, because that unleashes a torrent of emotions he refuses to let himself access. 

And all of this manifests in the man in front of him, grin still so big he wants to smash it. “Hi, I’m Alex-Claremont Diaz. Son of Ellen Claremont, she’s running for president? I assume you consume at least a little of politics in your Kensington Palace bubble.” He laughs at his own joke, and Henry hates how musical and perfect it sounds. God.

He stiffly takes his hand and awkwardly shakes it, making the tension between them crackle that little bit higher. The easy, easy smile begins to fall off Alex’s face, replaced by a face of mild confusion, and Henry wants him gone. He turns to Shaan, still standing behind him. “Can you get rid of him?”

Shaan sighs and starts furiously tapping on his phone. It doesn’t matter – by the time Henry turns back around, Alex is shooting him the most furious glare he’s seen on his otherwise smooth face and walking away, back to June and a girl standing close by. The sick sense of satisfaction running through him doesn’t make sense, but he pretends it does.

He quickly walks out of the stadium with Shaan and heads to the bathroom, choosing not to use the loo but to instead scrub his hands until it feels like a layer of his skin has been removed. Taking a shaky, shaky breath, he wrenches his eyes away from his hands and forces himself to look in the mirror.

It’s the same as always. Tense, purple bags under his eyes. Papery white skin, devoid of any colour. The odd patch on his neck where he desperately patted on concealer this morning, not wanting to give the tabloids anything – he hates them so much he wants to scream sometimes. Eyes that are dull and dead and devoid of any kind of life. 

He thinks, with a humourless giggle rising, the last time he properly smiled was two years ago, when his dad gave him the signet ring. Remembers the exact words that went with it as he dropped it into his hand with a tweak of his eyebrow, a satisfied smile on his face as Henry weighed up the gift with awe.

“One day.” His voice was garbled at that point, destroyed by the disease. “I want you to give that to somebody you love.” His voice may have been scratchy, but the warmth of the smile on his lips and the glimmer in his eyes was unmissable. 

In some part of Henry’s heart, he knows his dad knew about him, that the girls around him never interested him in the ways the boys did. But growing up in the royal palace meant that it was never expressed to him as something he could pursue, and it took getting older and hardening to the harshness of the world to learn that.

And his dad went out of his way to indicate “I know, and I love you, and I’ll never, ever care.” 

His eyes twitch with water just thinking about it. He misses his dad so much it physically aches, so much he’d sacrifice everything to see him one last time. But that’s not possible – time goes on and people fly in and out of his life and he learned long ago that on the list of things people care about for him, emotions was pretty far down. 

He walks out of the bathroom only to bump into June Claremont-Diaz, and knowing how – well, rude he was to Alex, he smooths his hair and offers his hand. “June Claremont-Diaz, I’m supposing?”, with his Winning Prince Charming Grin on his face.

June glares at him and drops his hand like it’s burning hot. “Stay the fuck away from my brother, you piece of shit.”

He swallows and quickly sidesteps her, knowing he couldn’t have fucked up this first meeting any more. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He wants to go home and get drunk with Pez and forget that today ever happened. 

Shaan’s ushering him out now and he just wants to get away, can’t bear to be here anymore, just wants to cry until his brain falls too far apart for him to think about everything that’s happened today properly.

Underneath it all, he shoves away images of curls against the nape of a brown, tanned neck, and lips the colour of still-blooming roses, freckles so faint they might not even be there, hands waving in the air with reckless ambition, how damn pretty Alex is.

Because if he lets himself think about that too hard, everything will get fucked up.

**Author's Note:**

> so this is the first chapter of my new fic!! i'm trying to aim for each chapter to be 2k, so it should end up around 12k :) i realize there's no obvious internal "i love you" in this chapter, but this is more about establishing the hidden feelings that henry is starting to develop, which i hope comes through. i'm so excited to see where this fic will take me and i have so many ideas for it so get excited (and i'll be straying quite a bit away from canon, hopefully nobody will mind :D)
> 
> i hope you enjoy, and i'll be updating this as fast as possible!
> 
> (un-proofread or beta'd as usual because i'm a gemini, i live life on the Edge)


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